Alejandro Jodorowsky

Early life Alejandro Jodorowsky was born on February 17, 1929, in Tocopilla, Chile to immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents Jaime Jodorowsky Groismann and Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi from Yekaterinoslav and Elisavetgrad in the Russian Empire. According to Jodorowsky's account, he was conceived from sexual violence that his mother had faced, as his father was physically and sexually abusive towards her. Due to this, his mother disliked Jodorowsky, and detested his father. Alejandro also had an elder sister, Raquel Jodorowsky, but disliked her, as he believed that she was selfish and trying to "expel me from the family so that she could be the centre of attention." Alongside his dislike for his family, he also held contempt for many of the local people, who viewed him as an outsider because of his status as the son of immigrants. Jodorowsky did not have a Bar Mitzvah or celebrate any Jewish holidays as his parents concealed their Jewish identity for much of Jodorowsky's life. Jodorowsky moved to Santiago at the age of 9, a decision he did not favor, as he liked the local areas of Tocopilla. Growing up, his dislike of the American mining industrialists who worked locally and treated the Chilean people badly later influenced his condemnation of American imperialism and neo-colonialism in Latin America in several of his films. He immersed himself in reading, and also began writing poetry, having his first poem published when he was sixteen years old, alongside associating with such Chilean poets as Nicanor Parra, Stella Díaz Varín and Enrique Lihn. Becoming interested in the political ideology of anarchism, Jodorowsky briefly attended the University of Chile, studying psychology and philosophy, but dropped out after two years. After leaving university, he developed an interest in theatre and particularly mime, he took up employment in a circus as a clown, as well as beginning a career as a theatre director. Meanwhile, in 1947 he founded his own theatrical troupe, the Teatro Mimico, which by 1952 had fifty members, and the following year he wrote his first play, El Minotaura (The Minotaur). Performing arts career and Panic Movement foundation Jodorowsky moved to France as he felt there was little for him left in Chile. He settled in Paris and started to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He also started to study mime with French actor Étienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux's students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau's troupe that he went on a world tour, and wrote several routines for the group, including "The Cage" and "The Mask Maker". After this, he returned to theatre directing, working on the music hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris. In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, where he settled down in Mexico City. He continued to return occasionally to France, on one occasion visiting the Surrealist artist André Breton, but had increasingly felt disillusioned by him as he felt he had become somewhat conservative in his old age. Continuing his interest in surrealism, in 1962 he founded the Panic Movement along with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor. The movement aimed to go beyond conventional surrealist ideas by embracing absurdism. Its members refused to take themselves seriously, while laughing at those critics who did. It was in Mexico City that he encountered (1928–1997), a Zen Buddhist monk who had studied at the Horyu-ji and Shofuku-ji monasteries in Japan before traveling to Mexico via the U.S. in 1967 to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became a disciple of Takata and offered his own house to be turned into a Zendō. Subsequently, Takata attracted other disciples around him, who spent their time in meditation and the study of koans. Eventually, Takata instructed Jodorowsky that he had to learn more about his feminine side, and so he went and befriended the English surrealist Leonora Carrington, who had recently moved to Mexico. ==Film career==

Early comics and films In 1957, while Jodorowsky was in Paris studying mime, he created Les têtes interverties (The Severed Heads), a 20-minute adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella. It consisted almost entirely of mime and told the surreal story of a head-swapping merchant who helps a young man find courtship success. Jodorowsky played the lead role. The director Jean Cocteau admired the film and wrote an introduction for it. It was considered lost until a print of the film was discovered in 2006. In 1966, he produced his first comic strip, Anibal 5, which was related to the Panic Movement. The following year he created a new feature film, Fando y Lis, and was subsequently banned in Mexico. El Topo and The Holy Mountain (1970–1974) In 1970, Jodorowsky released the film El Topo, which sometimes is known in English as The Mole, Along the way, he violently confronts a number of other individuals, before finally being killed and being resurrected to live within a community of deformed people who are trapped inside a mountain cave. Describing the work, he stated that "I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill." Knowing how Fando y Lis had caused such a scandal in Mexico, Jodorowsky decided not to release El Topo there, Around the same time (2 November 1973), Jodorowsky participated in an isolation tank experiment conducted by John Lilly. Shortly thereafter, Allen Klein demanded that Jodorowsky create a film adaptation of Pauline Réage's classic novel of female masochism, Story of O. Klein had promised this adaptation to various investors. Jodorowsky, who had discovered feminism during the filming of The Holy Mountain, refused to make the film, going so far as to leave the country to escape directing duties. In retaliation, Allen Klein made El Topo and The Holy Mountain, to which he held the rights, completely unavailable to the public for more than 30 years. Jodorowsky frequently decried Klein's actions in interviews. Soon after the release of The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky gave a talk at the Teatro Julio Castillo, University of Mexico on the subject of koans (despite the fact that he initially had been booked on the condition that his talk would be about cinematography), at which Ejo Takata appeared. After the talk, Takata gave Jodorowsky his kyosaku, believing that his former student had mastered the art of understanding koans. Dune and Tusk (1975–1980) In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert's epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Jodorowsky planned to cast the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, in what would have been his only speaking role as a film actor, in the role of Emperor Shaddam IV. Dalí agreed when Jodorowsky offered to pay him a fee of $100,000 per hour. He also planned to cast Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen; Welles only agreed when Jodorowsky offered to get his favourite gourmet chef to prepare his meals for him throughout the filming. The book's protagonist, Paul Atreides, was to be played by Jodorowsky's son, Brontis Jodorowsky, 12 years old at the start of pre-production. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd and Magma. Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The production for the film collapsed when no film studio could be found willing to fund the movie to Jodorowsky's terms. The aborted production was chronicled in the documentary ''Jodorowsky's Dune, directed by Frank Pavich. Subsequently, the rights for filming were sold to Dino De Laurentiis, who employed the American filmmaker David Lynch to direct, creating the film Dune in 1984. The documentary does not include any original film footage of what was to be Jodorowsky's Dune though it states that the unmade film was an influence on other science fiction films, such as Star Wars, Alien, The Terminator, Flash Gordon and Raiders of the Lost Ark''. In particular, the Jodorowsky-assembled team of O'Bannon, Foss, Giger, and Giraud went on to collaborate on the 1979 film Alien. Later, in January 2023, Frank Pavich, director of the documentary film ''Jodorowsky's Dune, published an essay in The New York Times related to Jodorowsky's Dune'' (and more) that involved artwork generated by generative AI. After the collapse of the Dune project, Jodorowsky completely changed course and, in 1980, premiered his children's fable Tusk, shot in India. Taken from Reginald Campbell's novel Poo Lorn of the Elephants, the film explores the soul-mate relationship between a young British woman living in India and a highly prized elephant. The film exhibited little of the director's outlandish visual style and was never given wide release. Santa Sangre and The Rainbow Thief (1981–1990) In 1989, Jodorowsky completed the Mexican-Italian production Santa Sangre (Holy Blood). The film received limited theatrical distribution, putting Jodorowsky back on the cultural map despite its mixed critical reviews. Santa Sangre was a surrealistic slasher film with a plot like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho with Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac. It featured a protagonist who, as a child, saw his mother lose both her arms, and as an adult let his own arms act as hers, and so was forced to commit murders at her whim. Several of Jodorowsky's sons were recruited as actors. He followed in 1990 with a very different film, The Rainbow Thief. Though it gave Jodorowsky a chance to work with the "movie stars" Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif, the executive producer, Alexander Salkind, effectively curtailed most of Jodorowsky's artistic inclinations, threatening to fire him on the spot if anything in the script was changed (Salkind's wife, Berta Domínguez D., wrote the screenplay). That same year (1990), Jodorowsky and his family returned to France to live. Attempts to return to filmmaking (1990–2011) , Spain (2006) in Paris (2008) In 2000, Jodorowsky won the Jack Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF). Jodorowsky attended the festival and his films were shown, including El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which at the time had grey legal status. According to festival director Bryan Wendorf, it was an open question of whether CUFF would be allowed to show both films, or whether the police would show up and shut the festival down. Until 2007, Fando y Lis and Santa Sangre were the only Jodorowsky works available on DVD. Neither El Topo nor The Holy Mountain were available on videocassette or DVD in the United States or the United Kingdom, due to ownership disputes with distributor Allen Klein. After settlement of the dispute in 2004, however, plans to re-release Jodorowsky's films were announced by ABKCO Films. On 19 January 2007, it was announced online that Anchor Bay would release a box set including El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Fando y Lis on 1 May 2007. A limited edition of the set includes both the El Topo and The Holy Mountain soundtracks. And, in early February 2007, Tartan Video announced its 14 May 2007, release date for the UK PAL DVD editions of El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and the six-disc box set which, alongside the aforementioned feature films, includes the two soundtrack CDs, as well as separate DVD editions of Jodorowsky's 1968 debut feature Fando y Lis (with his 1957 short La cravate a.k.a. Les têtes interverties, included as an extra) and the 1994 feature-length documentary La constellation Jodorowsky. Notably, Fando y Lis and La cravate were digitally restored extensively and remastered in London during late 2006, thus providing a suitable complement to the quality restoration work undertaken on El Topo and The Holy Mountain in the States by ABKCO, and ensuring that the presentation of Fando y Lis is a significant improvement over the 2001 Fantoma DVD edition. Prior to the availability of these legitimate releases, only inferior quality, optically censored, bootleg copies of both El Topo and The Holy Mountain have been circulated on the Internet and on DVD. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Jodorowsky attempted to make a sequel to El Topo, called at different times The Sons of El Topo and Abel Cain, but did not find investors for the project. In an interview with Première, Jodorowsky said he intended his next project to be a gangster film called King Shot. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in November 2009, however, Jodorowsky revealed that he was unable to find the funds to make King Shot, and instead would be entering preparations on Sons of El Topo, for which he claimed to have signed a contract with "some Russian producers". In 2010, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City staged the first American cinema retrospective of Alejandro Jodorowsky entitled Blood into Gold: The Cinematic Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky would attend the retrospective and hold a master class on art as a way of transformation. This retrospective would inspire the museum MoMA PS1 to present the exhibition Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Holy Mountain in 2011. The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry (2011–present) In August 2011, Alejandro arrived in a town in Chile where he grew up, also the setting of his autobiography The Dance of Reality, to promote an autobiographical film based upon his book. On 31 October 2011, Halloween night, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) honored Jodorowsky by showing The Holy Mountain. He attended and spoke about his work and life. The next evening, he presented El Topo at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center. Alejandro has stated that after finishing The Dance of Reality he was preparing to shoot his long-gestating El Topo sequel, Abel Cain. By January 2013, Alejandro finished filming on The Dance of Reality and entered into post-production. Alejandro's son and co-star in the film, Brontis, claimed the film was to be finished by March 2013, and that the film was "very different than the other films he made". On 23 April, it was announced that the film would have its world premiere at the Film Festival in Cannes. coinciding with The Dance of Reality premiered alongside the documentary film ''Jodorowsky's Dune'', which premiered in May 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival, creating a "Jodorowsky double bill". In 2015, Jodorowsky began a new film entitled Endless Poetry, the sequel to his last "auto-biopic", The Dance of Reality. His Paris-based production company, Satori Films, launched two successful crowdfunding campaigns to finance the film. The Indiegogo campaign has been left open indefinitely, receiving donations from fans and movie-goers in support of the independent production. The film was shot between June and August 2015, in the streets of Matucana in Santiago, Chile, where Jodorowsky lived for a period in his life. The film portrays his young adulthood in Santiago, years during which he became a core member of the Chilean poetic avant-garde alongside artists such as Hugo Marín, Gustavo Becerra, Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra and others. Jodorowsky's son Adan Jodorowsky plays him as an adult; and Brontis Jodorowsky plays as his father, Jaime. Jeremias Herskovitz, from The Dance of Reality, portrays Jodorowsky as a teenager. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 2016. Variety's review was overwhelmingly positive, calling it "...the most accessible movie he has ever made, and it may also be the best." During an interview at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, Jodorowsky announced his plans to finally make The Son of El Topo as soon as financial backing is obtained. ==Other work==

Jodorowsky released a 12" vinyl with the Original Soundtrack of Zarathustra (Discos Tizoc, Mexico, 1970). Comics Jodorowsky started his comic career in Mexico with the creation of Anibal 5 series in mid-1966 with illustrations by Manuel Moro. He also drew his own comic strip in the weekly series Fabulas pánicas that appeared in the Mexican newspaper, El Heraldo de México. He also wrote original stories for at least two or three other comic books in Mexico during those days: Los insoportables Borbolla was one of them. After his fourth film, Tusk, he started The Incal, with Jean Giraud (Mœbius). This graphic novel has its roots deep in the tarot and its symbols, e.g., the protagonist of The Incal, John Difool, is linked to the Fool card. The Incal (which would branch off into a prequel and sequel) forms the first in a sequence of several science fiction comic book series, all set in the same space opera Jodoverse (or "Metabarons Universe") published by Humanoids Publishing. Comic books set in this milieu are the Incal trilogy, the Metabarons trilogy, and The Technopriests. Many ideas and concepts derived from Jodorowsky's planned adaptation of Dune (loosely based upon Frank Herbert's original novel) are featured in this universe. Mœbius and Jodorowsky sued Luc Besson, director of The Fifth Element, claiming that the 1997 film borrowed graphic and story elements from The Incal, but they lost their case. The suit was plagued by ambiguity since Mœbius had willingly participated in the creation of the film, having been hired by Besson as a contributing artist, but had done so without gaining the approval of Incal co-creator Jodorowsky, whose services Besson did not call upon. For more than a decade, Jodorowsky pressured his publisher Les Humanoïdes Associés to sue Luc Besson for plagiarism, but the publisher refused, fearing the inevitability of the outcome. In a 2002 interview with the Danish comic book magazine Strip!, Jodorowsky stated that he considered it an honour that somebody stole his ideas. Other comics by Jodorowsky include the Western Bouncer illustrated by Francois Boucq, Juan Solo (Son of the Gun), and Le Lama blanc (The White Lama), the latter were illustrated by Georges Bess. Le Cœur couronné (The Crowned Heart, translated into English as The Madwoman of the Sacred Heart), a racy satire on religion set in contemporary times, won Jodorowsky and his collaborator, Jean Giraud, the 2001 Haxtur Award for Best Long Strip. He is currently working on a new graphic novel for the U.S. market. Jodorowsky's comic book work also appears in Taboo volume 4 (ed. Stephen R. Bissette), which features an interview with the director, designs for his version of Frank Herbert's Dune, comic storyboards for El Topo, and a collaboration with Moebius with the illustrated Eyes of the Cat. Jodorowsky collaborated with Milo Manara in Borgia (2006), a graphic novel about the history of the House of Borgia. Psychomagic Jodorowsky spent almost a decade reconstructing the original form of the Tarot de Marseille. Jodorowsky has several books on his therapeutic methods, including Psicomagia: La trampa sagrada (Psychomagic: The Sacred Trap) and his autobiography, La danza de la realidad (The Dance of Reality), which he was filming as a feature-length film in March 2012. To date, he has published more than 23 novels and philosophical treatises, along with dozens of articles and interviews. His books are widely read in Spanish and French, but are for the most part unknown to English-speaking audiences. For a quarter of a century, Jodorowsky held classes and lectures for free, in cafés and universities all over the city of Paris. Typically, such courses or talks would begin on Wednesday evenings as tarot divination lessons, and would culminate in an hour-long conference, also free, where at times hundreds of attendees would be treated to live demonstrations of a psychological "arbre généalogique" ("tree of genealogy") involving volunteers from the audience. In these conferences, Jodorowsky would pave the way to building a strong base of students of his philosophy, which deals with understanding the unconscious as the "over-self", composed of many generations of family relatives, living or deceased, acting on the psyche, well into adult lives, and causing compulsions. Of all his work, Jodorowsky considers these activities to be the most important of his life. Though such activities only take place in the insular world of Parisian cafés, he has devoted thousands of hours of his life to teaching and helping people "become more conscious," as he puts it. Since 2011 these talks have dwindled to once a month and take place at the Librairie Les Cent Ciels in Paris. His film Psychomagic, a Healing Art premiered in Lyon on 3 September 2019. It was then released on streaming services on 1 August 2020. ==Influences and impact==

He has cited the filmmaker Federico Fellini as his primary cinematic influence; other artistic influences included Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and Luis Buñuel. He has been described as an influence on such figures as Marilyn Manson, Darren Aronofsky, Taika Waititi, Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn, Peter Chung, Takashi Okazaki, Jan Kounen, Dennis Hopper, Eric Andre, the musical duo Suicide, and Kanye West. Fans included musicians Peter Gabriel, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López of The Mars Volta, Brann Dailor of Mastodon, Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore (of the pop-duo Empire of the Sun). Lady Gaga was influenced by Jodorowsky and The Holy Mountain in the video for her song 911. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn thanks Alejandro Jodorowsky in the ending titles of his 2011 film Drive, and dedicated his 2013 Thai crime thriller, Only God Forgives, to Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky also appeared in the documentary My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, directed by Refn's wife Liv, giving the couple a tarot reading. Jodorowsky has influenced the poetic work of his friend Diego Moldes, in two books: Ni un día sin poesía (Not One Day Without Poetry, Madrid, 2018), with a prologue by Alejandro Jodorowsky and in Ni una poesía sin día-Not a Poem Without a Day (New York, 2023). Argentinean actor Leandro Taub thanks Alejandro Jodorowsky in his book La Mente Oculta, for which Jodorowsky wrote the prologue. ==Personal life==

Jodorowsky holds both Chilean and French citizenship. His first wife was the actress Valérie Trumblay. They had three sons: Teo, Axel "Cristobal", and Adan. They divorced in 1982. He is currently married to the artist and costume designer Pascale Montandon. He had five children. • Brontis Jodorowsky (b. 1962), an actor who worked with his father in El Topo, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, is the child of Jodorowsky and Bernadette Landru. Brontis has a child, the fashion model Alma Jodorowsky, who is the granddaughter of Alejandro. • Teo (d. 1995), who appeared in Santa Sangre, was the eldest child of Jodorowsky and Valérie Trumblay. a psychoshaman and an actor (interpreter in Santa Sangre and the main character in the shamanic documentary Quantum Men), was the second child of Jodorowsky and Valérie Trumblay. • Eugenia Jodorowsky, Jodorowsky's fourth child, is the child of Jodorowsky and an unknown mother. • Adan Jodorowsky (b. 1979), a musician known by his stage name of Adanowsky, was the third child of Jodorowsky and Valérie Trumblay, and Jodorowsky's fifth child overall. On his religious views, Jodorowsky has called himself an "atheist mystic". He does not drink or smoke, and has stated that he does not eat red meat or poultry because he "does not like corpses", basing his diet on vegetables, fruits, grains and occasionally marine products. In 2005, Jodorowsky officiated at the wedding of Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese. ==Criticism and controversy==

When Jodorowsky's first feature film, Fando y Lis, premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, the screening was controversial and erupted into a riot, due to its graphic content. Jodorowsky had to leave the theatre by sneaking outside to a waiting limousine, and when the crowd outside the theatre recognized him, the car was pelted with rocks. The following week, the film opened to sell-out crowds in Mexico City, but more fights broke out, and the film was banned by the Mexican government. In regard to the making of El Topo, Jodorowsky allegedly stated in the early 1970s: In the documentary ''Jodorowsky's Dune'', Jodorowsky states: Jodorowsky was criticised for these statements. Matt Brown of Screen Anarchy wrote that "it's easier to wall off a certain type of criminality behind the buffer of time—sure, Alejandro Jodorowsky is on the record in his book on the making of the film as having raped Mara Lorenzo while making El Topo—though he later denied it—but nowadays he's just that hilarious old kook from Jodorowsky's Dune!" On 26 June 2017, Jodorowsky released a statement on his Facebook account in response to the question: "Did you rape an actress during the filming of El Topo?" The following excerpts are from said statement: In July of 2016, Jodorowsky sparked controversy on Twitter when he posted a tweet stating: This message provoked negative reactions across the site, with one user replying: "I was raped as a child. Now, despite loving my partner, I still cannot pleasure him.", to which Jodorowsky replied: Jodorowsky proceeded to delete this reply afterwards, stating: ==Filmography==

Acting roles Documentary appearances • Jonathan Ross Presents for One Week Only (1991) • The Jodorowsky Constellation (1994) • NWR (2012) • ''Jodorowsky's Dune'' (2013) • My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (2015) • Psychomagic, a Healing Art (2019) ==Bibliography==